The purpose of this systematic review was an assessment of the efficacy of aftercare in chronic patients and the frail elderly when discharged from hospital, as regards quality of life, compliance, costs, medical consumption and quality of care. In pursuit of this goal, 17 publications on the effects of aftercare after discharge from hospital were examined. A systematic assessment of methodolog...

BACKGROUND As Japan's population ages, more frail elderly people are cared for by members of their family. The dynamics within such families are difficult to study, in part because they are difficult to quantify. We developed a scale for assessing family dynamics related to long-term care. Here we report on the development of that scale, and we present the results of reliability testing and val...

A cross-sectional study was conducted to explore the potential association between work environment and/or stress coping ability, and depressive status among caregivers working for "group homes (GHs)" in Japan. In January 2010, 438 out of 700 caregivers working at GHs in Sapporo City returned completed questionnaires to us. The questionnaires consisted of the Center of Epidemiological Scales-De...

The pattern of patients admitted to internal medicine wards has dramatically changed in the last 20-30 years. Elderly people are now the most rapidly growing proportion of the patient population in the majority of Western countries, and aging seldom comes alone, often being accompanied by chronic diseases, comorbidity, disability, frailty, and social isolation. Multiple diseases and multimorbid...

BACKGROUND There is interest as to whether case management reduces unplanned patient admission to hospital. However, very little is known about how the intervention is delivered and what the most salient outcome measures are. DESIGN Qualitative study embedded in a wider evaluation. SETTING Primary health care. METHOD Analysis of case manager case reports in a service innovation evaluation...

BACKGROUND many instruments are available to identify frail older adults who may benefit from geriatric interventions. Most of those instruments are time-consuming and difficult to use in primary care. OBJECTIVE to select a valid instrument to identify frail older adults in primary care, five simple instruments were compared. METHODS instruments included clinical judgement of the general pr...

Introduction: The Netherlands Organisation of Health Research and Development (ZonMw) has launched the ambitious National Care for the Elderly Programme to improve care and support for frail elderly persons. This four years programme (2008–2011) is initiated by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. The budget is 80 million euro. Description: The programme consists of three steps. First, re...

This paper reviews current demographic and programmatic trends with respect to the frail elderly. These trends include the projected growth in population of those 65 and older between now and 2030; the rapidly improving economic status of the 'older adult population and its effect on views of what the elderly's share of public money should be; the increasing diversity, fragmentation, and comple...

Internationally, family members or spouse caregivers are critical in maintaining and improving the quality of life of individuals living with cancer. By providing about 70%–80% of patients’ cancer care, informal caregivers reduce the demands on the health‐care system, with significant economic benefits. Despite their value to society and economy, caregivers remain largely a hidden workforce, ta...

Perhaps the clearest indications of adverse environmental health effects have been responses to short-term excursions in ambient air quality or temperature as deduced from time-series analyses of exposed populations. However, current analyses cannot characterize the prior health status of affected individuals. We used data on daily elderly death counts, ambient air quality indicators, and tempe...